


if you'd only asked-

by teenspock



Category: Star Trek: The Original Series
Genre: Angst without plot, Implied Sexual Content, M/M, Songfic, super melodramatic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-27
Updated: 2018-12-27
Packaged: 2019-09-28 11:03:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,108
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17181743
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/teenspock/pseuds/teenspock
Summary: After the events of The Motion Picture, Kirk finds himself back, as per usual, in bed with Spock. Questions are asked, some more monumental than others.





	if you'd only asked-

**Author's Note:**

> 100% born of me listening to amanda palmer's bed song too many times and being insufferably depressed ...this is basically that....... just without the death and all
> 
> warning this is very rambley and unedited read at your own risk

“I’d never noticed this.” He raises his head, shuffles across the blanket, and, with his thumb and forefinger, pinches Spock’s earlobe.

It isn’t his old bed, and doesn’t feel like his old bed, but it feels like he is on his old bed still. It is the captain’s bed after the refit, and it feels like a bed that has been dragged in from the medbay, too firm and too clean. But a bed is a bed. And all beds tend to feel the same with Spock in them.

There is a tensing in that irregular line of him at that slight touch, Kirk’s fingers at the hinge of his jaw, tracing the uneven edge, but he doesn’t speak. His face obscured by the sharp shoulder as it is, the only indication of his discomfort would be him turning even further away, but he doesn’t do that. Kirk’s voice is uneven, he continues to toy with it. They haven’t touched since they were in the medbay, and he attempts to gloss over the anticlimax of it by speaking more.

“Looks like it was sliced open. Has it always been this way? You’d think I would have noticed before.”

And yes, the first contact since medbay should be more romantic, he thinks, than fingers against a right earlobe, hates himself for it, for a moment. He has stumbled into this room, into this bed, found the man already sprawled across the left side, still, and still uniformed. As if by force of habit. Kirk says nothing, knowing he is awake, knowing he doesn’t sleep uncovered. He lays beside him for several minutes, and then he reaches over, and touches his earlobe, and it is painfully unromantic, and the line of his body tells him so.

In the three cities they have slept in, two of them have shaped them to be this way. Their flop. The bed they shared, he can see Spock just like tonight, curving into himself, that line obscured by the sheet he pins over him and against the side of his head, to keep the heat from leaving. You couldn’t tell there was anything wrong. Kirk doesn’t have to roll to him, simply reaches out and touches that straight wall of worn flannel, lays his arm across where his shoulder would be, feels out the shape of it. Spock would die of pneumonia before letting in that sort of heat, of course, and why? Kirk bites his tongue, turns from him, releasing him, stares into the ceiling and listens to the slow cars below and the trudging steps on the staircase. The long beam of light that covers the bed from around the curtain, inoffensively washing over the blue shape there. His dying thought as he falls asleep, who did one have to talk to to be turned into a warm ray of sunshine. 

San Francisco. He doesn’t know what possesses him to ask. But then he is on Earth, in the penthouse, he is standing in the middle of the floor, realizing the box he has just opened doesn’t belong to him, and he sees the bed. It isn’t a bed for two people connected by the hip, people with arms around one other. Of course not. There is something very cruel in Spock agreeing to live with him, but doing it this way. He looks up from his paperwork, eyes big under that amateur shadow, that gave the impression of a cat eye without being explicit, he says something slow and dismissive. There is minimal possibility of accidental contact, and Kirk wants to dive across that desk and demand to know what is wrong with him. As practical as Starfleet quarters were designed to be, there is a certain...security in knowing there is no risk of touch. Kirk almost reaches to that dreadful slate-blue uniform and yanks him forwards. You? Or me? I want you to touch me. Why would I ask you to live with me if I didn’t want you to touch me? Why don’t you want me to touch you? He never can find it within himself to ask what is the matter with Spock. Perhaps he is afraid there is nothing, that he simply grew tired of being with him, finds it illogical to keep up the trials of romance, even sleeping close enough to touch him being too much. 

Before that was the time they blew apart the city instead, curled up in the stone corner of their cell with slight smiles and the ridiculous cloak of Spock’s civilian dress swept up over them both. Kirk would die to recapture that, the carelessness in their exhaustion, the back-breaking hardness that is their bed, Spock’s arm his pillow, Spock’s head turned so his open mouth is against Kirk’s hair. He would die. He counts the occasions on his fingers, he wants to write them down and relay them to Spock in a manner he can understand. He wants to make a presentation of it, the series of events, each bed a separate exhibit, the hypothesis something along the lines of whatever is wrong with you, it has bred itself in our sleeping arrangements.

Spock has never liked touch. Kirk had once believed he had been the exception to that. But he doesn’t like touch, didn’t like to brush hands, didn’t like to be held, didn’t even like Kirk to touch his ear with two fingers. He would always go entirely still, for a moment, before relaxing. Back when they would touch freely, and he would touch Kirk himself, his fingers barely skimming the length of his arm, his ribcage, shaking but so unafraid. Now, he was afraid. Now, to touch Kirk with his eyes was almost too much. They would lie there together, the expensive bedspread over his shoulders, he is always cold now, and Kirk would try to catch his eye, stare at him for minutes at a time before he would pivot away, and sometimes Kirk would see the gleam of the lamplight on the surface of his eyes, and curse himself for not being big enough to ask.

Spock leaves San Francisco. He takes one bag, and walks out as Kirk as in the other room, feeling his stomach drop at the click of the door, knowing what it means. He leaves the pillows, and the blankets, two and a half feet of mattress, that belonged exclusively to him for seven weeks. Kirk wonders more than once, nose pressed into those pillows, salty and heartachingly cold, what you make beds from in the Vulcan desert.

If it were anyone but Spock, he would hate them, and he wouldn’t even speak to them, let alone love them. Spock is, however, a puzzle made of several different sets, alien and human and neurodivergence in both and Kirk is piecing him together blindfolded and he would do so with his teeth if he needed to. He would be silent, if he needed to, and he would not touch him, but he still felt as though there were something that was not innate, something that entered him in New York or around then, that turned his head for him and seized him whenever someone came to touch him. Something that Kirk knew how to fight or negotiate with. That he failed to do so with, before Spock left. Now he was back, and he was alive again, and he had touched him in the medbay, but it was threatening to be the same song. 

In the end, he doesn’t hear if it was some accident in his rigorous Vulcan upbringing, or some birth defect, because as his knuckles fall across his jaw and shoulders, Spock turns, entirely, eyes wide, and with that smudge of the lightest shadow under his raising brows. his lips slowly parted, a question there that Kirk knows well, but that hasn't been asked for years, not since drunken parties in San Francisco, stumbling inside and finding that taste of chocolate and vodka on his tongue, falling back onto the couch together, Spock with that dazed look of arousal, pupils dilated, that yellow flush across his face. Hair a mess, that silky little black thing he wore that made him look like an incredible goth shoved up his chest, one hand thrown up across his mouth. Watching like he wasn't even involved, a spectator on a screen. Kirk with his starving mouth all over him, on his knees in front of the couch, clumsily accosting every inch of forbidden skin, then waking up, in the dim sunrise through the french windows, Spock passed out, still up on the couch beside him. Not talking to him when they met in the morning, maybe even with eyes narrowed in resentment, and he doesn’t know how to say that he was drunker than Spock, and sadder than spock, and that Spock had been the one to stop inside the doorway and unfasten the center of that little Vulcan robe he wore over his jeans so that the hollow under his sternum, that little crest of bone near his heart became visible, and it was fully intentional, and he had looked straight at Kirk as he did it. He doesn’t know how to say it, almost glad the blame is on him, and not Spock himself, because Spock is subconsciously ruthless in blame, as illogical as it is.

In their little floating city in space, Kirk is very glad they are not cold or drunk or exhausted, because when Spock turns to him, there is no question of his conviction, but he doesn’t fuck him, can’t get so far as to do so. He is no longer concerned about what slips between their mouths, the dark, steady taste of him on his tongue, and he finally works up the courage.

"What was it, that drove you away all those years?”

“Human emotion.” He answers, as if it were a joke, his voice light, and so low it gives Kirk shivers.

“Human emotion.”

“The fear of it.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

"You never asked."

His hands at the sides of Spock’s head, digging into his hair, the soft movement of their legs slipping together, it is all too much. When he looks at him, eyebrows raising as he clarifies that very simple truth, it lodges itself right down in Kirk’s throat, and confirms all his worst suspicions in one, simple blow.

"Spock,"

“It is in the past. On Vulcan, one would say Kaiidth.”

“I wanted to ask. I nearly did. I should’ve. I don’t know what was wrong with me, all those years, to make me afraid of you. I hardly knew you.. I still don’t.” He reaches up again, to that nick in Spock’s ear.

“We were both afraid.”

It reminds him of those years spent alone in that bed, his lapse back into insomnia, the near-fear of sleeping alone, how incredibly disassembled Spock had left him, landlocked and alone on top of it. Even with Spock so far away, it was enough to be near him in the physical sense. Without him, he was just...afraid.

All beds feel the same with Spock in them. Safe. Kirk gets a hold of himself, finds the zipper at the back of Spock’s uniform, watching Spock watch him with that alert, almost teasing look. “That terrified me, that whole thing. Imagine we died before I could ask. That really would be hell. I’m glad I know, now.” He could spend a thousand years in a bed with Spock, kissing him, having a conversation with him. As Spock bends at the waist to meet him, and they finally begin to speak again, pick up from that night in prison when they had huddled together for warmth, as if New York had never happened. 

Hours later:

“It was a sehlat.”

“What was a sehlat?”

“That cut me. When I was a child. It was an accident.” He says something about Vulcan regeneration, his mixed biology preventing the full healing of the wound. His words slightly slurred into the pillow underneath him, his eyes shut, one hand brushing over the shell of his own ear. That choppy, factual manner of speaking that indicated his creeping exhaustion.

“Now I know.” Is Kirk’s response. Leaning inwards, he reaches to Spock’s covered shoulder, allows his hand to fall, then presses against his back, pulling them together in a burst of courage. A human emotion. Spock is unmoved by the advance, the curl of his fingers into the sheet the only reply. There doesn’t seem to be anything the matter with him, not for a long, long while.


End file.
